It has been estimated that over 350,000 deaths occur each year in the United States due to cardiac arrhythmia. Many of these deaths could be prevented by rescue procedures such as CPR and defibrillation by properly trained persons in rescue procedures. Thus, there is a continuing need to provide training to the public and to medical personnel in the proper treatment of a patient undergoing cardiac arrest or in need of rescue procedures. In order to train a student properly in rescue techniques, hands-on training aids such as manikins are often utilized. The disadvantage to prior art training aids is that separate devices are often needed to provide the full range of training. For example, CPR manikins and CPR prompting devices are used in training students CPR, while real defibrillator devices are used as defibrillator training aids. These devices can be quite costly. Further, the use of real defibrillator devices in a training environment creates a possible danger of discharging an unintended potent electric shock. Further, these type of devices in general only assist in the instruction of the use of the defibrillator, and do not provide instruction in the use of CPR or other rescue techniques such as rescue breathing. Still further yet, these training devices generally assume that the patient is of a sufficient age to receive shock treatment. In addition, prior art defibrillator and CPR training devices generally do not instruct the trainee to check for a pulse after a victim has received a shock treatment nor after a series of CPR compressions have been given. Finally, these type of training devices do not teach the proper placement of the paddles upon the patient.
These and other features and advantages of the invention will become apparent in the detailed description and claims to follow, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.